Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Week 5, Day 5

This is getting to be ridiculous.

I went to Rousai Hospital again for the latest update on my progress. Basically, what they found was this:

Nothing.

Well, not really "nothing" in the "nothing" sense. My body fluids came up perfectly clean. On the other hand, both the X-ray and the ultrasound scanner showed nothing but a baffling shadow. Just a patch of thin, white fuzz in a very suspicious place. In other words, it seemed like something was there, or at least should be there, possibly something big, possibly not, but it was impossible to tell for sure. It was like looking at a dark-colored smudge on a photograph and saying, "That could be a flea running across the lens, or it could be a rhinoceros beetle flying by a few meters away, or it could be the photographer's finger."

At one point, the doctor grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "In all honesty, I'm stumped."

However, I was still showing symptoms of a kidney stone. The little bugger had to be in there somewhere.

Sighing, the doctor got on the phone and immediately squeezed me in between two other patients for a quick CT (cat) scan, my third in five weeks (which is a bit more frequent than they tend to prefer). However, that turned out to be the clincher. The little bastard showed up clear as a bell. It's not as big as the doctor had feared. (It's about the size and shape of two BBs glued together.) It has also moved a considerable distance and is probably on the verge of being ejected.

Of course, the doctor said something like that last time...

Anyway, it seems I'm not totally out of the wilderness yet. I'll be staying on the gut-bloating medicine for another few weeks and then going in yet again. What the hey. It's still better than surgery...or a catheter...

About

I came to Japan in 1990 for what was supposed to be a two-year stint. Then, by some bizarre stroke of fate, I got a real life, so I'm still here. For a gaijin with an imagination and more than his share of sensitivity, these islands are a never-ending source of adventure.

About Me

I was born on a rainy day on the Oregon Coast (no surprises there) and through a rather convoluted sequence of events wound up in Japan. I'm a teacher by trade, moonlighting as a musician and composer. I also do quite a bit of writing on the side. I'm a dreamer, a thinker, a sayer, and a doer all wrapped in one deceptively mild-mannered package.